


tough and cracked and blooming

by colloquialrhapsodist



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 11:45:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2066916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colloquialrhapsodist/pseuds/colloquialrhapsodist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the light of the Cosmo Candle, Aerith reflects on herself - as an Ancient, as a flower girl, as just Aerith.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tough and cracked and blooming

_The last one._

She’d never really given much thought to what that  _meant_ before.

The stars were clear, in Cosmo Canyon - clearer and cleaner than in any town she had been to so far, closer and warmer than even on the midnight beaches of Costa del Sol where she’d wandered, in the dead of night, far enough into the water so it lapped at her ankles. The ocean was a lot like the sky - endless and tireless and incomprehensible - but that, at least, could be touched, felt, even scooped up for a moment, until the water trickled through her loose fingers, the drops catching the light like falling stars.

It was just as much a part of the earth as her, or her flowers, or her dreams, grounded in the salt and the rough earthen sand. Intimate to her, like the smell of grass and rain - even though grass never grew in Midgar, and it hardly ever rained.

But the taste of stars was foreign, and she couldn’t hear their voices, though she knew - she  _knew_  - how hard they must fight to burn in their own corners of the galaxy, if any of them were anything like the Planet.

_The last one. The last Ancient._

That was her, wasn’t it? Aerith? Aerith, the flower girl from the slums? The one with the hand-me-down ribbon and the warm, careful smile and the happily worn dress and the dirty skin with soil stuck under her fingernails? Or was she Aerith the Ancient, the one whose ribbon and smile and dress and skin were all  _pretty_  and unbroken and fragile and filled with timeless, frigid history?

They all  _wanted_  her history - Shinra, she meant. Even Tseng wanted a bit of it, who knew her better than anybody else, and dammit, every time she thought of him, her dirty nails left half-moon circles in her calloused palms.

Tseng. Maybe a taste of her old life would make her feel like she had roots again.

Sitting on the hard, infertile dirt, scraping her fingers across it over and over again like she thought she could feel the tough and cracked ground in the church -  _and THAT’S me, isn’t it, tough and cracked and blooming, not a relic, not dust_  - 

\- sitting on the dirt and under the stars, stars that she  _couldn’t_ touch, her old Materia burning a hole in the back of her head, and filled up with the life -  _spirit energy,_  Bugenhagen had called it - of everything around her -

\- even in all her travels, for a moment, she really  _did_  feel like Aerith the Ancient.

She frowned, hard.

Well, that was just silly, wasn’t it? For so long that’s all Shinra wanted her to be - their compass, their tool, their pretty little flower, like the Materia they ripped from the ground by its roots. How silly that now, of all times, she felt the weight of that identity pressing down on her from the stars; how silly that when she was under scrutiny, she’d known that wasn’t all she was, but when given a hint of freedom and a glimpse of the real sky, she wasn’t so sure anymore.

_I know, I know_ , she’d said to Cloud, when he said she was still  _Aerith._

She’d wanted to remind herself of her roots just a moment ago, hadn’t she? The  _Cetra_  were her roots - just out of sight, untouchable, yes, like the stars over Midgar, but just as much her roots as her adopted mother and the chipped, harshly glittering signs of Wall Market and the thick sunlight streamed with dust in her old church.  _Just as much._

Not more. Not less. Like the dreams from her memories, filled with voices she couldn’t make out and waking from them to the hint of Elmyra’s cooking.

The thought comforted her, slightly.

She looked over at the endlessly flickering Cosmo Candle, and she wondered. Nanaki - Nanaki the  _nameless,_  until just a few short hours ago, and how far away was he from who he was that he’d given them no more than his experiment tag to call him by? - was crouched, or curled up, tense, and she wondered what he could be thinking of so intently that made the fur around his single visible eye scrunch so thickly. What sort of questions did the stars and the whispering past give him? How many of them did he want to answer?

Cloud was murmuring something to Tifa, and they were immersed in memories, too, and she saw the glint of his beautiful eyes reflect in the flames.

Bright, impossible blue. Like the sky. Like Zack’s.

SOLDIER eyes - as he constantly reminded them. SOLDIER eyes. Cloud Strife, the ex-SOLDIER.

_I want to know the real you,_  she whispered in her mind.  _Like so many of us want to know ourselves._

When she was fifteen and young and tired of the slums, she told Zack she was afraid of the sky.

It turns out, that wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t something he or anybody else could rescue her from; it was something borne in her, something innate, something she’d neither run from, nor fully become - like how she prayed, every day, for Nanaki to be more than the specimen, or Barret to be more than his righteous AVALANCHE anger, or Tifa to be more than her memories, or Cloud to be more than SOLDIER.

The sky - with its thousand, silently whispering stars, impossible to touch or to understand - reminded her of what she was, but not  _who_  she was.

_Have sweet dreams beneath the stars,_  the innkeeper had said, and Aerith slept soundly that night, her resolve returned.

Later, when she would go off on that final, solo leg of the journey, and pray for all that would save them and everything she loved and everything that kept her  _rooted_  - it wasn’t pretty and mysterious Aerith the Ancient that did that.

It was Aerith, a flower girl from the slums.

Just Aerith.


End file.
